博主按：今天被学院的青年老师抓差，去简短介绍写好的英文学术论文的经验和教训。因为不可能讲太多，只能介绍一些基本的principles。仅供参考。

(More) Practical Rules for Academic English Writing in the Social Sciences

Shiping Tang (Fudan University)

Prepare for Writing: Think through these things before starting the actual writing!

1.      Do you have a story to tell, and the story has to be empirical, theoretical (empirical theory), or both? If you do not have a story to tell, do not waste your time on writing the thing.

2.      Is it a good enough story?

a)        “标签型”、“判定型”文章通常都不大可能发表。A simple re-labeling exercise or a simple assertion will not sell. (比如，用“农民理性”来解释中国的经济奇迹。这样的文章在英文世界基本上不可能发表)

b)        “口号型”文章通常也不大可能发表。

c)        Just enlisting anecdotal evidences will not sell. 花絮性的故事是文学，不是社会科学。

d)        Many journals do not publish purely descriptive stuff anymore, even if the story is good.

3.      And are you willing to devote a lot of time and energy to complete the story? (Writing is not part of this consideration, at least for now!)

a)        Develop a new and sound theory: increasingly, this is almost a mandatory part of for any paper in any major empirical social sciences journal.

b)        Data, data, data! Do you have enough empirical data/evidences to back up your theory, whether quantitative or qualitative?

c)        Together, do your data and theory make into a coherent whole?

4.      At this stage, if you still believe that you have a good enough story to tell, you are now ready.

Actual Writing: These techniques are to be taught and learnt separately.

Many believe this is the most difficult part of the process. This is totally untrue: the previous part (preparing a good story) is the most difficult and time-consuming part!

Writing things up when you have a good story to tell is easy! I will teach these things when you pay!

Before that, however,

1.      Have a rough outline, and start writing now! Nobody gets anything written by trying to think through everything: we write better as we write more (see also Munger’s advice).

2.      Write, read, edit, read, edit,…. And ask a few colleagues to read them.

Reading for Academic Writing in Social Sciences

1.      Build a good vocabulary, now!

2.      Take reading notes, and putting them into your computer. (Few can recall all the things they read before, do not believe in those nice stories).

3.      Learn the elements of style: try to appreciate others’ writing style.

4.      Take advantage of electronic services: content alert is a key tool for you to get a hold of the current research frontier.

5.      However, please do not just read journal articles, if you want to become a serious scholar. (I understand that reading only journal articles is convenient when you are young and under pressure to publish as many as possible and ASAP). In the long run, however, merely following those papers is detrimental to our advancement of knowledge, if not also to your career.

6.      Superficial knowledge is useful for forging some initial ideas and finding some inspirations. But you should never stay superficial when you really want to write something.

7.      Hence, do not assume that you have invented the wheel: many of the things you are so excited may have been done by others in other fields (and may even have been proven to be wrong and rejected. [For instance, geno-politics, geno-economics, and geno-sociology was already there in the 1970s, and it was called sociobiology back then!]

8.      Do not just follow others, the glory is with setting the trend, not following a trend.